How Ed Sheeran Smashed The Charts And Amassed a £50m Fortune

He got his first guitar at four, recorded an album at 13 and still dates a girl from school: How scruffy and shy Suffolk boy Ed Sheeran broke the charts with NINE singles in the Top Ten and amassed a £50m fortune PHOTO: Ed Sheeran and close fried Taylor Swift share an embrace There’s no substitute for talent. If you doubt that, just take a look at Ed Sheeran. With that thatch of red hair, those muscular arms and general scruffiness, at first glance you might mistake him for a farm labourer who has just left his tractor in a field. But looks can deceive. At the moment he’s the most popular singer/songwriter in the nation and worth an estimated £50 million (and counting). Not for him the quiffed and polished image of manufactured rock stars, with their strategically ripped £500 designer jeans, glow-in-the-dark teeth and Photoshopped complexions. A T-shirt and jeans are all he needs. With his abilities, he doesn’t need extraneous gloss. Instead, he relishes and celebrates his very ordinariness. He’s got a Top Five hit with a song about going back to see his old mates in the little Suffolk town in which he grew up. It’s called Castle On A Hill, and it’s about the places and people who made him what he is, and what happened to some of them. It’s autobiographical, but it could be about you and your children, or everyone one of us, as we step into the future, with one eye looking back over our shoulders. PHOTO: Sheeran currently has nine of the Top 10 singles, all taken from his latest album, Divide They love it at Radio 2, you may have noticed. But, then, Ed Sheeran, still only 26, is loved everywhere, and by young and old. Not content with having his first three albums in the top five bestsellers in the country, nine of the Top 10 singles, all taken from his latest album, Divide — now at Number 1 — are by him, too. As it happens, that’s due to a crazy new system whereby songs streamed digitally to headphones and computers are now listed as separate hits in the charts. If it had been possible to count the popularity of separate album tracks in the days of Oasis, Fleetwood Mac and The Beatles, they, too, would have overwhelmed with numerous Top 10 hits. But that’s just an anomaly in the current counting. It isn’t Ed Sheeran’s fault — to his credit, he’s described it as a crazy situation. ‘I never expected to have nine songs in the Top 10 ever in my life, so yeah, I don’t know, something’s gone wrong. But I’m definitely very, very happy about it,’ he said on Friday. PHOTO: Ed Sheeran with his mother Imogen. He was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Framlingham, Suffolk And it in no way diminishes his huge significance in popular music. Divide created a new record for the fastest-selling album by a solo male singer in the UK. Nearly 700,000 copies were bought — with only albums by Adele and Oasis doing better in their first week. But these aren’t the only amazing figures in his record-breaking career so far. It’s not only in Britain that he’s made it big. His two Grammys for song-writing are testament to his growing popularity in the U.S., too. He’s also bagged an Ivor Novello Award, and written hit songs for Justin Beiber and One Direction, and helped Taylor Swift with another. Undoubtedly, he is a phenomenon. But does his very success, and his bloke-ish public image, tell us something bigger about changes in music and in those who listen to music? You would have to say that, like Adele before him, Ed’s very different from the ‘construct-a-star’ image of many recent hit-makers. PHOTO: Sheeran as a school boy (right) and with pop superstar Paul McCartney No manager groomed him for stardom. He did it on his own, starting out in the little town of Framlingham in Suffolk, where his father is a lecturer and his mother a jewellery designer. He got his first guitar at four and began writing songs while at school. By 13, he had written and privately recorded his first album — and had plans for another 14. It was called Spinning Man. One song on it went ‘I am a typical, average teen, if you know what I mean’, borrowing half a line from Lennon and McCartney. But although most of the songs were about the break-up of a first love, he wasn’t a typical teenager at all. Most boys of that age don’t write, play, sing and record their songs, burn the CDs themselves, design the covers for them. The intent was clearly there, and by the time he was 17 he’d quit school and was turning up with his guitar wherever he thought he might be able to sing and get noticed, always writing and privately recording, busking and putting his videos on YouTube. He didn’t have the best voice in the world, singing at the top of his range, but it was always very distinctive, and his lyrics spoke to his own age group — songs of young love and friendships, everyday matters. Little by little the ambition paid off. A company owned by Elton John began to manage him, and, having got the longed-for recording contract, one Friday night in 2011 he went on BBC’s Later . . . With Jools Holland The A Team was a seriously grown-up song about a crack-addicted ***. It sold nearly a million copies around the world, with the lyrics painting, in a dozen or so sharp images, the despair in the girl’s life. The public reaction was immediate. Glastonbury followed, after which success became a roller coaster. More hits: there was You Need Me, I Don’t Need You, Sing and Thinking Out Loud. But somehow he’s never seemed to change, never lost the humour or self-deprecation. He may be one of Britain’s richest under-30s and have a £900,000 Suffolk estate, but he does not flaunt it. Yet his address book has some of the most famous names in music, as well as fans such as Bill Clinton, Wayne Rooney, the Beckhams and Princess Beatrice, who cut his face with a sword while pretending to knight singer James Blunt PHOTO: School friends: Ed is pictured with girlfriend Cherry Seaborn He needed stitches but . . . such are the japes that our Ed now has with fellow celebrities and royalty! Then after an astonishing five years, he disappeared from public view and took off to travel the world for six months, often unrecognised, with his girlfriend, Cherry Seaborn. Yes, he’s had his flings with celebrities — singer Ellie Goulding, for sure — but it’s no surprise Cherry, a financial adviser, is a girl he met at school. They did what lots of twentysomethings do on a Gap Year, explored Japan, went bungee-jumping in New Zealand, and saw the Northern Lights in Iceland (where Ed burned his foot in a geyser). Dropping out was a risk many other stars might not have dared take. The public is fickle. They can forget you in a year, he was probably warned. But he knew he needed time to recharge. He’s come back this year stronger than ever, and, as we can see, the public absolutely haven’t forgotten. Ed Sheeran’s talent lies in the fact that he’s clearly a brilliant constructor of songs, and he and his management team at Rocket, understand very well the changing digital methods of promoting and selling music around the world. But they can only sell what the public want to buy. For the past couple of decades glossy, industrially constructed pop has ruled, where the image and beat have been supreme, when female singers have been over-sexualised, and lyrics have often been asinine. There is nothing asinine about Ed’s lyrics. They’re clever little slices of life as we all know it. It might be too early to say, but is it possible that Ed Sheeran is leading the way back to a more literate time in popular music? A time when lyrics meant something, and weren’t just there for the singer to parrot while looking sexy or cute in a YouTube video. I’d like to think so.